Nihonkai daikaisen: Umi yukaba

I just visited the Mikasa (the flag ship of the japanese navy during the russo-japanese war, which is wonderfully preserved at yokosuka) on my last trip to Japan. They show this movie periodically down below in a small theatre. It had great naval battle scenes of the Japanese fleet beating the hell out of the Russians. Good stuff.

This was surprisingly bad. Some aspects are competent, but there are uncomfortable scenes in the first half and a lot of dead air in the second. If it's an anti-war movie, it doesn't convey it well, and if it's trying to be exciting and/or patriotic, it fails there as well. It's just very dull, and lacks action, which of course wouldn't be a criticism you'd direct towards an anti-war movie, but I feel like this isn't trying to be overtly anti-war.

Maybe near the end it hammers home some horrors? But the boredom and lack of things happening don't work in an anti-war movie way. It's not like Das Boot where the lack of action adds to the movie by conveying the tedium and anxiety of war.

I guess I don't know what it's going for. At least Toshiro Mifune is there, but he doesn't do much. It uh looks okay? And the brief action near the end is decently done. But it's not worth watching over Port Arthur (1980), which has some of the same cast and the same director (Toshio Masuda). That one's not a great movie at all, but it had more going for it than Battle Anthem.

I don't really need to tell people to avoid it. It's got next-to-no reviews and that's understandable, to be honest.

Rarely I would encounter such badly scripted boring screenplay. About 4/5 of it was wasted in loosely patched scenes with lot of nonesense dialog. The Japanese Navy in this movie just looked like a bunch street thugs on a floating metal tub. I didn't expect this sea battle movie so childishly made. The high ranking Japanese officers were very serious, but the low level sailors were just a bunch of yoyos in white sailors uniforms. What a joke!

Mifune Toshiro previously played Japanese naval hero Togo Heihachiro in Maruyama Seiji's "Battle of the Japan Sea" (Nihonkai daikasen, 1969), a large-scale production, that offered a general outlook of the Russo-Japanese War (1904 - 1905). Mifune reprises the role in "Battle Anthem" (Nihonkai daikasen: Umi yukaba, 1983). The film has a different perspective. Instead of depicting the diplomatic players, as the previous film did, this gives the central attention to the young soldiers, who fought in the war, as well as Japan's decisive victory in Tsushima Strait.

Though neither of these films really clicked for myself, I found this to be the better one, despite it being nowhere near as famous as the predecessor. At least this film paints characters that the audience comes to know, and shows what it was like to be a Japanese soldier at time. Then again, if you come to watch this film without any historical background about that particular war, you may get a little lost, as this film is not going for a thorough contextualization as "Battle of the Japan Sea" did.

Unlike the previous film, this one has a romance. I did not care for it, as it starts as pure harassment, and then turns into melodrama. Also, if you are a Mifune fan, you are probably are going to enjoy "Battle of the Japan Sea" much more, since he doesn't have nearly as much screen-time in "Battle Anthem". Togo is also a character so widely admired, that Mifune's two performances as this man are one-dimensional, and even stale. Mifune does not get to show his versatility as an actor, but instead just reads his lines like a good boy.

If you are not terribly interested in Japanese war films, I wouldn't really recommend either of these films. The Japanese have made so much better films about World War II and other conflicts in the country's long history.